Hotsos 2010 - Day 2 - The conference begins

Doug's Oracle Blog

A 3:30 start, which gave me lots of time to work on my demos and by breakfast time at 7:30, I felt in a reasonable place (but not quite done yet) and headed down to eat ... wait for it ... some fruit! Then again, I'd eaten so little the previous day that I had to eat something.

First up was Gary Goodman opening the event and introducing Tom Kyte's keynote with :-

a) A video of Tom and Hotsos regular Patty, Disco Dancing to mark tomorrow night's Disco theme. Personally, I thought it was hilarious and I hope it gets posted online somewhere. I'm not sure everyone found it as funny, but it did the trick for me.

b) A gift of a custom set of poker chips because I believe Tom's a player (of poker, that is). Tom's keynote was about (looks for title in notes and can't find it) the mistakes we make *because* of our experience and our assumptions. It was thoroughly entertaining and kicked off with a quiz for four volunteer participants who had to answer 12 apparently simple questions very quickly. They were trick questions, of course Rather than me taking voluminous notes, I'm hoping that Tom might post the questions on his blog (hint, hint) even though they were meant to be answered quickly based on verbal questioning.

Oh, and I couldn't believe it when my phone started ringing, for someone who's normally exceptionally careful about that stuff. I had it on silent last night, missed a text from Alex G and so had taken it off silent. Clown! (In retrospect, this should have been a warning sign.)

There were tons of great examples of where clever people have gone spectacularly wrong through over-confidence. We're often wrong when we answer quickly based on our prior experience because things change. I suspect I sometimes frustrate colleagues by not giving the snappy answers they expect, but I know that Oracle stuff is often not as obvious as it seems at first sight. There was even a sighting of Martin Widlake's "Making Things Better Makes Things Worse" but no name-check, Martin, so you're only *almost* famous

I particularly enjoyed the video I hadn't seen of Richard Feynmann talking about the uncomfortable state of confusion and feeling stupid. (With hindsight, why did I not see the warning signs ...)

Then I skipped two sessions I was looking forward to but, as I've said before, I need to take care of my own presenting business before I can enjoy and learn from other people's presentations. However, I bumped into a friend after Richard Foote's session and he thought it was amazing. My friends first trip to Hotsos is going well.

Sitting in my room, I was really happy with how the demos were looking, raring to go and went to iron my shirt. Damn, the iron wasn't working and I really didn't have time to wait for another to show up. No problem, though, because I always carry a special shirt that *really* doesn't need ironing - just hang it up in the bathroom with the shower on. (Another warning sign, though?)

I'm very superstitious about using any new kit for the first time, so I was still nervous about a couple of things with the demos

1) Performance, because I know I'd run them all weekend and have a new powerful laptop (more on that another time), but the demos are designed to hammer the machine. So I thought I'd disable everything I didn't need running.

2) Driving the projector because I'd never driven one with the new laptop. I arranged to check that my laptop would drive the projector ok. It seemed to, but one of the demos was behaving strangely. No time to investigate because Dan Norris needed the podium, so I decanted to Alex's Battle Against Any Guess presentation because we'd been discussing it, I know he was concerned about how it would go and wanted to show a little moral support.

In the event, he needn't have worried. Personally, I find his Russian accent all but impenetrable, particularly after we've had a few beers and are both shouting at each other, but I'm sure the feeling's mutual! But the fact that he had the room rolling about with laughter at regular intervals meant it had gone very well! I hope he still does plenty of technical presentations with lots of demos, but he proved he can do something a little more conceptual and message-driven. Better still, I'd been frantically trying to get my demos working at the back of the hall by re-enabling services I'd disabled and they started to work I turned round to Cary Millsap who was hiding their too and dramatically mimed wiping the sweat away from my brow. Time to head back into the other room and watch the tail-end of Dan Norris' Database Machine presentation. I didn't see nearly enough and was completely pre-occupied by what was to come, so will need to catch up on the slides later.

Some interesting Q & A at the end which were slightly less interesting for me because my demos started playing up again! So, a room full of people, I'm rebooting my laptop, nothing is working and then, bang, it's time!

Whilst my presentation was originally part of this post, my review is so long-winded and personal, I've moved it to another post that people can choose to skip over! That way it doesn't detract from the good presentations I saw yesterday, such as Kevin Closson's "Ten Years After Y2K And We Still "Party Like It's 1999"".

Excellent, as always, and packed full of information, it also sort of tied up the way the day opened, albeit in a very different tone and style that things change. Kevin has the perspective of having been in the industry a long time, so he's seen the past, but also being able to see where we are now and where we're going, so he concentrated on a few of his pet subjects that I'm pretty sure you'll see cropping up on his blog in the near future but, to give you a taster, he talked about the merits of SMT on Nehalem EP chips for different workloads, which is something we'd been talking about at the opening reception. I'm pretty sure I can't disable it on my laptop to give it a try, but I might have a word with him about it anyway. He talked about Flash, Direct-attached storage, NFS, virtualisation and all that good stuff as always but because I missed the first 10 min for a much-needed break and couldn't read the slides because I forgot my glasses, I'm going to have to try to hit on him for a copy of his slides later! Oh, and I was wondering why the presentation was well attended but not packed. I'd forgotten Tom Kyte was speaking next door. I was happy with my choice.

I did have one more presentation scheduled, to see the first of Kerry Osborne's but I was pretty low at this stage and sleep deprivation was kicking in, so I headed back to my room to catch up with some blogging and tweeting (thanks for the support) and then it was time for dinner with the Oak Table crew. Very nice it was, too, hats off to Marco and Carol for choosing that place, the company of all and for Carol's consistently top-notch organisation and geek-ferrying. Nice big lump of beautiful steak, some chips and a beer. That's more like it! A few more drinks back at the bar but I made my excuses and left at 11:30 despite some vain attempts at hypnotising me into staying!

Oh, but the weather was still rubbish all day

Regardless of everything that happened yesterday, I now have 3 days of no responsibility and can just learn, socialise, eat and perhaps sleep a bit more. I woke up at 3:30 again this morning, but turned over and managed another 2 hours. Bliss!

Well-attended? I loved speaking to all of you who weren't willing to endure standing room only for a Tom Kyte session. That's the second speaking opty in a row where I pulled that straw. I'm taking drastic measures to make sure that doesn't happen again

Disclaimer

For the avoidance of any doubt, all views expressed here are my own and not those of past or current employers, clients, friends, Oracle Corporation, my Mum or, indeed, Flatcat. If you want to sue someone, I suggest you pick on Tigger, but I hope you have a good lawyer. Frankly, I doubt any of the former agree with my views or would want to be associated with them in any way.